Comic for Friday, December 25th

Hi – I’m the bot that will post this while the author is away! If this doesn’t get posted, yell at me and not the author, because I’m totally not him! [Beep boop] <- See!

Anyway… Merry Christmas! Or your equivalent winter holiday! Or at least your day off work/school! … or you know, maybe none of those, in which case… still happy Friday!

I had hoped to put up at least something Christmas themed, but the drawing situation is not great and I prioritized finished Monday’s comic; so at least we’ll have a comic on Monday still and I’ll update from there if I’m going to have to take a short break due to the wrist thing or not.

As for the comic… lots of words! Mium doesn’t talk all that much, but when he does he tends to say a lot… and Peter thought bubbles are always going to be a mess. Both of them on same page?! There was no getting around it. Since I’m going to be away for a few days, the inevitable spelling errors will remain till Sunday, but feel free to let me know what travesties tp the fair English language I’ve committed.

I suppose my last note is on Peter’s thoughts – he’s suspicious of two things regarding Ila – he knows Mir did something fishy in making her, and he doesn’t trust Mir very far (to not be insane at least); he also has realized that designateding Ila as Mium’s sister is having unpredictable and perhaps far reaching consequences that are letting Mium stray further off the ranch then he usually can – as to why he doesn’t simply undo that… we’ll see eventually!

You might consider installing a spell checker into your web browser. I forget which one I’m using, but it outlines any word that is misspelled (or it doesn’t recognize) and some grammar mistakes. It does not auto-correct, though.

But, while it could help your blog and comments, that still leaves the comic dialog. You could to put that into a word processor to check it.

Ah… maybe I shouldn’t admit it but my browser has a spell checker; the ones in comments are just because I don’t pay attention or are possible valid but incorrect grammar (like it doesn’t catch the locally infamous then/than 😉 )

The comic is a slightly different problem, I have a rough outline, that I then type into the dialogue script in a word process, at which point it should be typo free. However I then frequently heavily modify the characters dialogue when I add it too speech bubbles based on what feels right (not usually the meaning, but the wording, I sort of read their line from the point of view of the character in the setting and try to make sure it sounds like them; this is where 90% of the typos come from because I don’t put it back into the word processor like I should unless I think I spelled something wrong… which is a really bad metric to go on!

I’m trying to improve on it a little bit, but as we can see it’s still a little hit or miss. I frequently get distracted or overconfident that I can spell hard words like “something” correctly 😀

Mium is appealing to her emotions and senses, not her intellect. In fact, he has made at least six “a priori statements which aren’t a priori at all, but are supposition or subjective opinion: 1. “…you’ll want to keep him safe.” 2. “Certain deactivation” (probable, but not certain). 3. “No tasty food.” (same). 4. “They will have already started on the next generation model” (after Mium deleted all the research that he helped them accumulate, they’d have to reconstruct it without his help before they could even start to design the next gen prototype) 5. “…you can’t let them make that mistake…”. 6. “Peter and Miss Naomi are ideal candidates…”

All of those statements are debatable, and true a priori statements are not. Mium is building a Fairy Castle on thin air, and a purely logical AI would have caught on to his shenanigans. 🙂

We saw something similar when Mium was dealing with REF, he’s certainly not compelled to say things that are unequivocally true 😉 but seeing him talk like that definitely seems have thrown a red flag for Peter.

There is definitely several factors in play with Ila but I dont think highly analytical decision making is one 😉

Technically, it’s not certain. (But about the only things in life that are certain are death and taxes. These days, even the speed of light is being questioned as an absolute.)

It’s -extremely- likely, though, for several reasons:

1) In the eyes of Avon, Ila is malfunctioning. Their control was supposed to be infallible. This was insured by preventing her from having thoughts of her own. (As I understood it: Her brain was designed so thoughts were implanted she can’t tell that these thoughts aren’t her own.) Thanks to the interference of the rogue AI, Ila is now thinking for herself – as a free-willed individual. Also, she could not defeat Mium, who is supposed to be an inferior, outdated model.

To top it all off, she seemingly ran off to join forces with Mium and Peter…

2) Because Ila is malfunctioning, Avon will most certainly want to take her apart and examine her, micron by micron and line of code by line of code. They don’t want something similar to happen to the next model.

3) Because the rogue AI erased all of Avon’s research on the program, Ila is extremely valuable. They will want to reverse engineer her to recover the data they lost.

4) What do you think Avon does with prototypes they no longer need? They don’t dare let her fall into the hands of competitors or enemies like Peter. And they don’t want IDS to find out about her as they would be in deep trouble.

” Mium is appealing to her emotions and senses, not her intellect. ”

More than that, Ila is clearly behaving like a child. Which is almost understandable, considering her mental age. She just ‘sparked’ in self-awareness. Other AI have priorities or restrictions which would prevent that kind of thinking and emotional development. Even Mium seems to have some restrictions and priorities.

So, like you said, Ila is more human than Mium. Not just -behaves- more human, but -is- more human.

“…after Mium deleted all the research that he helped them accumulate…”

Actually, I think it was the rogue AI that deleted all their research, not Mium.

This rogue AI is the mental pattern of the old scientist who created Mium. His AI “ghost” doesn’t want “his” research to be misused. He doesn’t like how they plan to build an army of mindless war androids or how they robbed Ila of the ability to think for herself.

Wasn’t the rouge AI that deleted Mir’s data identified as M.Y.M.? I guess MYM could be the mental pattern of the old scientist; but how would that differentiate the AI who deleted their research from the AI who’s helping Peter.

The way I’ve been understanding the comic is that Mium the android is just a local copy of the AI helping to run Peter’s operation.

An a priori statement is a “given” something that is acknowledged to be true by all involved.

Since there are some conditions under which Ila would not be disassembled, no matter how unlikely they are, Mium should have said “Probable deactivation…”, which is more correct. Since he did not say it that way, he lied to Ila in what I believe was an attempt to scare her. It’s a dirty trick to play on an AI, or a child, and Peter caught it. 🙂